Black Hawk Down (2001) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error 160 elite U.S. soldiers drop into Somalia to capture two top lieutenants of a renegade warlord and find themselves in a desperate battle with a large force of heavily-armed Somalis. Director: From $9.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC a list of 39 titles created 03 Sep 2011 a list of 23 titles created 18 Mar 2013 a list of 35 titles created 12 Jun 2013 a list of 23 titles created 08 Jan 2014 a list of 35 titles created 5 months ago Title: Black Hawk Down (2001) 7.7/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Won 2 Oscars.

Another 8 wins & 37 nominations. See more awards » Videos A Russian and a German sniper play a game of cat-and-mouse during the Battle of Stalingrad. Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud A tale of war and romance mixed in with history. The story follows two lifelong friends and a beautiful nurse who are caught up in the in the horror of an infamous Sunday morning in 1941. Director: Michael Bay Balian of Ibelin travels to Jerusalem during the crusades of the 12th century, and there he finds himself as the defender of the city and its people. Director: Ridley Scott Peaceful farmer Benjamin Martin is driven to lead the Colonial Militia during the American Revolution when a sadistic British officer murders his son. Director: Roland Emmerich 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 7.6/10 X Marcus Luttrell and his team set out on a mission to capture or kill notorious Taliban leader Ahmad Shah, in late June 2005. Marcus and his team are left to fight for their lives in one of the most valiant efforts of modern warfare.

Director: Peter Berg The story of the first major battle of the American phase of the Vietnam War and the soldiers on both sides that fought it. Director: Randall Wallace An American military advisor embraces the Samurai culture he was hired to destroy after he is captured in battle. Director: Edward Zwick 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 7.3/10 X Navy S.E.A.L. sniper Chris Kyle's pinpoint accuracy saves countless lives on the battlefield and turns him into a legend. Back home to his wife and kids after four tours of duty, however, Chris finds that it is the war he can't leave behind. Director: Clint Eastwood A dramatization of the 20 July assassination and political coup plot by desperate renegade German Army officers against Hitler during World War II. Director: Bryan Singer In 12th century England, Robin and his band of marauders confront corruption in a local village and lead an uprising against the crown that will forever alter the balance of world power. Director: Ridley Scott During the Iraq War, a Sergeant recently assigned to an army bomb squad is put at odds with his squad mates due to his maverick way of handling his work.

Director: Kathryn Bigelow A grizzled tank commander makes tough decisions as he and his crew fight their way across Germany in April, 1945. Director: David Ayer Edit Storyline Action/war drama based on the best-selling book detailing a near-disastrous mission in Somalia on October 3, 1993. On this date nearly 100 U.S. Army Rangers, commanded by Capt. Mike Steele, were dropped by helicopter deep into the capital city of Mogadishu to capture two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord. This led to a large and drawn-out firefight between the Army Ranges, US Special Forces, and hundreds of Somali gunmen; resulting in the destruction of two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters. The film focuses on the heroic efforts of various Rangers to get to the downed black hawks, centering on SSG. Eversmann, leading the Ranger unit Chalk Four to the first black hawk crash site, Chief Warrant Officer Durant who was captured after being the only survivor of the second black hawk crash, as well as many others who were involved. Written by Matthew Patay: revised by Corbin L.

Reporting for Duty Christmas 2001 See more » Genres: Rated R for intense, realistic, graphic war violence, and for language | See all certifications » Parents Guide: 18 January 2002 (USA) See more » Also Known As: La caída del halcón negro See more » Filming Locations: $193,021 (USA) (4 January 2002) Gross: Did You Know? Trivia The donkey that Sgt. Ed Yurek briefly pets almost didn't make it into the film because of budget cuts. In fact, during the rewriting and re-editing of the script, screenwriter Ken Nolan found a note by Ridley Scott saying, "I miss the donkey". The donkey was eventually kept. See more » Goofs when CPT Steele calls out SFC Hooten to point out the safety of his weapon, it is obvious that when Hooten turns around, the right side of his rifle is facing outward but when Steele's finger is pointing at the safety lever, the left side of the rifle is facing outward See more » Quotes See more » Crazy Credits There are no studio logos at the beginning and the only opening credit is the title.

See more » Connections Courtesy of Reachout International Records, Inc.

(R.O.I.R.) By Arrangement with Ocean Park Music Group Tells it like it is 26 November 2004 | by BettieTeese (Australia) – See all my reviews I'm not a fan of war movies usually,but when i sat down to watch Black Hawk Down,i couldn't turn it off.Heres a war movie which doesn't sugar coat.There is no crappy dialogue,no soppy love story tie ins,just the real deal,brutal battle scenes,the gruesome reality of war.Black Hawk Down is based on a true story,the bloody battle at Somalia and it leaves one drained.Its confronting,and exposes war in its true light-there's nothing glamorous to see.In two hours and a bit the viewer is able to imagine being there at the horrible battleground,and suffering like the soldiers did.It really makes you appreciate how lucky we are to be in a free country,relatively peaceful,and not having our lives threatened every second of the day.Everything about BHD is right; the setting of the film,the Somalians,the American soldiers going through hell,the brutality,the battle,the fatalities.Not for the faint hearted,or weak stomached,but a truly powerful,compelling motion picture.Ridley Scott takes the viewer on an imaginative journey through

 Black Hawk Down and appeals to our emotions.A brutal,yet bearable war film.

146 of 186 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes Black Hawk Down (2001) - Decent Films Decent Films A- SDG The shadow of September 11 will not always hang over the movies, but as I watched Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down it seemed to be everywhere: an ominous column of smoke rising from a city skyline; people watching helplessly via video screens as a catastrophe unfolds before their eyes in real time; enemies striking an unexpected and terrible blow that seems to be as bad as anything can possibly be — followed by a second, equally terrible blow. Two helicopters down in the streets of Mogadishu; two towers down in the streets of Manhattan. 2001, Columbia. Directed by Ridley Scott. Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, Eric Bana, William Fichtner, Sam Shepard. Artistic/Entertainment Value About These Ratings What is it that a film like this offers us in times like these? Understanding? Catharsis? Perspective? The words seem irrelevant.

Black Hawk Down is the story of a disaster: an operation that began as a supposedly routine, 30-minute snatch-and-grab aimed at capturing high-ranking enemy officers, but spiraled out of control into a desperate 15-hour ground war merely to survive and escape. Some 120 American troops were engaged by thousands of Somali militia, civilians, even women and children — a whole city, really. It was the longest, largest firefight for American troops since Vietnam; eighteen Americans, and over 500 Somalis, were slain, and any number on both sides wounded. A few subtitles explain briefly the reasons for the American presence in Somalia in 1993. They seem to be good reasons. The country was stricken by terrible famine, thousands of Somalis were dying of starvation, and U.N. food shipments were being routinely waylaid by warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who opposed U.N. involvement and sought to maintain his own power. At the same time, the film suggests that American resolve wasn’t what it should have been: The Clinton administration initially alloted a mere three weeks for the military to restore order, and denied requests for armored vehicles and other ordnance.

We also gather that the enemy may have been underestimated. As the powerful Black Hawks swoop in low toward Mogadishu, we see a young Somali boy watching from a rooftop vantage point — then scrambling down with a phone in his hand, making a call that will bring out militia fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenade lauchers capable of crippling a Black Hawk. The film hints, too, at the long-term consequences of the disaster: President Clinton, unwilling to risk further loss of American life, immediately called off the humanitarian mission and pulled the troops out of the ongoing Somalian conflict. Afterwards, the prospect of sending troops into other foreign trouble zones (e.g., Rwanda, Zaire, Bosnia) faced a chilly reception in Washington — and here again we can’t help seeing the specter of September 11, which brought home with devastating force the impossibility of withdrawing from the world’s problems. But all of that in on the periphery here. Ridley Scott’s film — like the acclaimed newspaper serial story by Mark Bowden on which it is based — is essentially concerned with the events themselves, not with interpretation or commentary.

It’s a study in logistics: Its concerns are what, where, and when, not so much who or why. Black Hawk Down isn’t particularly interested with its subjects as characters in a film, which is all to the good. Like Steven Spielberg with Schindler’s List and Amistad , Scott respects his material by depicting it impersonally, with the focus on the event itself rather than some drama of irrelevant "characters" (cf. Titanic or Pearl Harbor ). In fact, Black Hawk Down is the kind of war picture one might have imagined Spielberg himself making, before he actually did make Saving Private Ryan , a film that begins with the anonymity of its famous opening battle sequence before morphing into a sentimental melodrama about characters. In a way, Black Hawk Down is the anti-Ryan: It begins with a lengthy, largely unnecessary prologue feebling attempting to establish one-dimensional characters, then kicks into high gear with the onset of the doomed mission. In my book, it’s a better balance, a purer sort of war picture.

When I reviewed Pearl Harbor , I observed that the big, bloated attack sequence at the film’s center was nearly twice as long as the opening sequence in Ryan , and expressed skepticism whether that kind of intense battle action could ever be sustained for much longer than the twenty or so minutes alloted in Spielberg’s film. Now, having seen Black Hawk Down, I find that it can, if it has structure and clarity. In Scott’s hands, battle isn’t reduced to an exercise in mere chaos or an assemblage of violent incident, but comes as a series of problems to be solved, obstacles to be negotiated, complications to be dealt with. Watching events unfold, we have a basic sense of where people are in relation to one another, where they need to get to, and so on, which at any given moment seems to be all that matters. Scott is a superb visual stylist, and his films are always interesting to look at (even though his last two, Gladiator and Hannibal , weren’t great films).

When he shoots the omimous Black Hawks prowling the airspace above the rooftops from the point of view of militiamen running through buildings and down alleyways, it’s like watching great white sharks drifting over a coral reef while their prey skulk about amid the coral. Though Scott perhaps wisely refrained from reproducing the most hauntingly familiar image from the action in Somalia — that of a dead American Ranger being dragged through the streets by jubilant Somalis — the images he creates are almost as devastating, and seem just as real. Scott also finds moments of terrible humor in the ghastly slapstick of war: In one scene, a Ranger slips and falls as he exits a building — inadvertently ducking beneath a hail of bullets from an ambusher’s gun. The ambusher is a young boy. His gunfire finds another target: a Somali man standing on the other side of the doorway who, judging from the boy’s anguished reaction, may be the boy’s father. Despite fleeting moments such as this, which briefly humanize the enemy, many critics have complained that the Somalis are little more than pop-up targets.

Yet that’s precisely what what one Ranger told Bowden it was really like, comparing the enemy to "silhouettes at target practice." Others have wrung their hands over the vision of hundreds of black Africans being blown away by a crew of (predominantly) white Americans. Yet unless one wishes to argue that this particular event ought not to have been depicted in film — or that the screenplay ought to have imposed a kind of retroactive affirmative action on the soldiers — I fail to see exactly what is being said. Such objections seem to me as misguided as complaints about lack of "characterization" among the soldiers. Even some of the clichéd dialogue, when there was room for it, had for me the ring of truth. When a dying soldier asked a comrade to deliver a message to his loved ones — prompting the inevitable, time-honored reply, "You’ll tell them yourself" — I couldn’t help feeling that this lie must actually be uttered on battlefields all the time. The film inevitably omits vivid details from Mark Bowden’s story.

On the first page of the Inquirer series we read that Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann (Josh Harnett) went to Mass the morning of the botched operation, and uttered Hail Marys as his men began roping out of the helicopter onto the street below. Later we read about how, when one pilot was captured, the Somalis (fearful of tiny transmitters in his clothing) began to strip him, but were unable to work the unfamiliar plastic snaps on his gear, until the pilot helped them open them. Yet the broad outlines of the story and even many specific details are here, straight out of Bowden. If Scott can’t include the whole wealth of detail Bowden brought to the story, he compensates with the greater visual and auditory immediacy of his medium, bringing us as close as possible to what those soldiers went through in that two-day period in October 1993. It’s a harrowing, unforgettable experience, one unlike any other war picture that has ever been made.

Tags: Movie Review - - FILM REVIEW; Mission Of Mercy Goes Bad In Africa - NYTimes.com FILM REVIEW; Mission Of Mercy Goes Bad In Africa By ELVIS MITCHELL Published: December 28, 2001 ''BLACK HAWK DOWN'' has such distinctive visual aplomb that its jingoism starts to feel like part of its atmosphere. Establishing mood through pictorial means is the director Ridley Scott's most notable talent. There may be no working director more accomplished at wringing texture out of the color blue than the prodigious and now prolific Mr. Scott; you'd swear that with his dazzling washes of blues and sand tones, he was inventing additional hues on the spot. Because Mr. Scott's eye delivers so much information, he then is at a loss to give the material a proper emotional grounding. ''Black Hawk Down'' is like Mr. Scott's ''G.I. Jane'' but this time with an all-boy cast. Sam Shepard, as Major General Garrison, seems to be smoking a Montecristo No. 2 primarily so that billowing clouds of Cuban smoke can register in the war room; it doesn't help that the cigar has been given as much characterization as anyone in the movie.

There are plot flags visible beside Old Glory. As in ''Pearl Harbor,'' the battle in ''Black Hawk Down'' is an eye-catching misfire, color-coordinated down to the tracer rounds. The film, whose title refers to downed military helicopters, dramatizes the failed United States mission to help relieve famine in Mogadishu, Somalia, late in 1992 by securing supply routes against Somali militias. Several hundred Somalis and 18 American soldiers lost their lives the next year in what was called the Battle of the Black Sea. The film was adapted from the best-selling account by Mark Bowden, which stacked up detail; Mr. Scott's slathering of visual elements is the pictorial correlative of the author's work. The producer Jerry Bruckheimer seems to have been making Ridley Scott movies his entire career, but this is the first time he and Mr. Scott have collaborated. Tony Scott, Mr. Ridley's twin brother, teamed with Mr. Bruckheimer on movies like ''Top Gun,'' the gold -- or rather gold-filled -- standard for incoherent militaristic propaganda. ''Black Hawk Down'' is ''Top Gun'' on an all-protein diet.

The soldiers, mostly ground troops, are much leaner than Tom Cruise was in that 1986 film, though they grin just as righteously. The movie quickly sketches the broad parameters for the story: American troops, in Mogadishu as part of a United Nations peacekeeping effort, plan to kidnap members of the inner circle of Gen. Muhammad Farah Aidid, the Somali warlord. Lean, lissome white soldiers with teeth pearlier than their eyes prowl the streets looking to do damage -- all except sad-eyed Sergeant Eversmann (Josh Hartnett), who smiles shyly and says he wants to make a difference. The vibrating melancholy of Hans Zimmer's score communicates the futility of Eversmann's proclamation. And when two helicopters are brought down and the mission is converted into a rescue, things get worse than anyone could have imagined. ''Black Hawk Down'' wants to be about something, and in the midst of the meticulously staged gunfire, the picture seems to choose futility arbitrarily.

The handsomely staged gunplay and explosions, rigorously matched to exacting Dolby Digital in selected theaters, abound, while a cast of non-American actors like Ewan McGregor, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom try out their Yankee soldier accents, with vowels so oddly enunciated that you expect them to be singled out as foreign spies. Again, Mr. Scott spot-welds his extraordinary painterly application of talent to video game detachment; his ''Gladiator'' looked like a Play station 2 product designed by Bruegel. But the mercilessness here is gruesome. In ''Black Hawk Down,'' the lack of characterization converts the Somalis into a pack of snarling dark-skinned beasts, gleefully pulling the Americans from their downed aircraft and stripping them. Intended or not, it reeks of glumly staged racism. The only African-American with lines, Specialist Kurth (Gabriel Casseus), is one of the American soldiers who want to get into the middle of the action; his lines communicate his simplistic gung-ho spirit. His presence in this military action raises questions of racial imbalance that ''Black Hawk Down'' couldn't even be bothered to acknowledge, let alone answer.

To make some obvious points about Western interests in oil, this picture imitates a few scenes in David O. Russell's remarkable 1999 war picture ''Three Kings,'' where the context was not sacrificed to politics. In ''Black Hawk Down,'' though, the backhanded attempt to provide the most minimal of contexts seems glib, as does Mr. Scott's skillful and facile handling of the action sequences, which supply an undeniably visceral excitement. The actors are mostly called upon for the kind of ''it's a man's man's man's man's world'' sloganeering before heading off to fight that characterizes most Bruckheimer films: dated martial wisecracks of the ''Let's rock 'n' roll'' variety. (When Sean Connery coughed, ''Good to go'' in ''The Rock,'' it was the death knell of hip-hop as we know it.) It's tiring to watch the actors, many of whom have appeared spouting these lines in previous Bruckheimer productions, doing the same thing; they're like rowdy guys who were left behind in Movie Star High School.

This unintentional repetition fits, since sitting through the accomplished but meaningless ''Black Hawk Down'' is like being trapped in an action film version of ''Groundhog Day,'' condemned to sit through the same carnage over and over. ''Black Hawk Down'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for a barrage of violence, dismemberment and mayhem, and the usual accompanying panicked strong language. BLACK HAWK DOWN Directed by Ridley Scott; written by Ken Nolan, based on the book with that title by Mark Bowden; director of photography, Slawomir Idziak; edited by Pietro Scalia; music by Hans Zimmer; production designer, Arthur Max; produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and Mr. Scott; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 143 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Josh Hartnett (Eversmann), Ewan McGregor (Grimes), Tom Sizemore (McKnight), Eric Bana (Hoot), William Fichtner (Sanderson), Ewen Bremner (Nelson), Sam Shepard (Garrison), Gabriel Casseus (Kurth), Kim Coates (Wex), Hugh Dancy (Schmid), Ron Eldard (Durant), Ioan Gruffudd (Beales), Thomas Guiry (Yurek), Charlie Hofheimer (Smith), Danny Hoch (Pilla), Jason Isaacs (Steele), Zeljko Ivanek (Harrell), Glenn Morshower (Matthews), Jeremy Piven (Wolcott), Brendan Sexton III (Kowalewski), Johnny Strong (Shughart), Richard Tyson (Busch) and Orlando Bloom (Blackburn). Black Hawk Down (2001) Synopsis - Plot Summary - Fandango GO Synopsis A quickly forgotten chapter in United States military history is relived in this harrowing war drama from director Ridley Scott, based on a series of Philadelphia Inquirer articles and subsequent book by reporter Mark Bowden.

On October 3rd, 1993, an elite team of more than 100 Delta Force soldiers and Army Rangers, part of a larger United Nations peacekeeping force, are dropped into civil war-torn Mogadishu, Somalia, in an effort to kidnap two of local crime lord Mohamed Farah Aidid's top lieutenants. Among the team: Staff Sgt. Matt Eversmann (Josh Hartnett), Ranger Lt. Col. Danny McKnight (Tom Sizemore), the resourceful Delta Sgt. First Class Jeff Sanderson (William Fichtner), and Ranger Spec. Grimes (Ewan McGregor), a desk-bound clerk getting his first taste of live combat. When two of the mission's Black Hawk helicopters are shot down by enemy forces, the Americans -- committed to recovering every man, dead or alive -- stay in the area too long and are quickly surrounded. The ensuing firefight is a merciless 15-hour ordeal and the longest ground battle involving American soldiers since the Vietnam War. In the end, 70 soldiers are injured and 18 are dead, along with hundreds of Somalians.

Black Hawk Down was voted one of the top ten films of the year by the National Board of Review prior to its limited Oscar-qualifying release. On the basis of his work in this film, co-star Eric Bana, a relatively unknown Australian actor playing Delta Sgt. First Class "Hoot" Gibson, won the lead in director Ang Lee 's version of The Hulk (2003). ~ Karl Williams, Rovi Provided by Rovi Black Hawk Down (2001) - Plot Summary - IMDb Black Hawk Down (2001) Plot Summary Showing all 2 plot summaries Action/war drama based on the best-selling book detailing a near-disastrous mission in Somalia on October 3, 1993. On this date nearly 100 U.S. Army Rangers, commanded by Capt. Mike Steele, were dropped by helicopter deep into the capital city of Mogadishu to capture two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord. This led to a large and drawn-out firefight between the Army Ranges, US Special Forces, and hundreds of Somali gunmen; resulting in the destruction of two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters.

The film focuses on the heroic efforts of various Rangers to get to the downed black hawks, centering on SSG. Eversmann, leading the Ranger unit Chalk Four to the first black hawk crash site, Chief Warrant Officer Durant who was captured after being the only survivor of the second black hawk crash, as well as many others who were involved. 160 elite U.S. soldiers drop into Somalia to capture two top lieutenants of a renegade warlord and find themselves in a desperate battle with a large force of heavily-armed Somalis. Synopsis In early 1990s Somalia, famine and civil war have gripped the country, resulting in over 300,000 civilian deaths and a huge United Nations peacekeeping operation being sent in... Black Hawk Down: naked propaganda masquerading as entertainment - World Socialist Web Site World Socialist Web Site Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) Black Hawk Down: naked propaganda masquerading as entertainment By Ann Talbot 19 February 2002 Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down sets out to tell the story of a US military debacle.

On October 3, 1993, Somali gunmen brought down two Black Hawk helicopters as American Special Forces tried to seize the warlord Farah Aideed. During a night of fighting 18 US soldiers died and 73 were wounded. One pilot was taken hostage and CNN showed scenes of American dead being paraded through the streets of Mogadishu. Within months the Clinton administration pulled US forces out of Somalia. Actor Josh Hartnett, who plays Army Ranger Staff Sgt. Matt Eversmann in the film, expressed the hope that after seeing Black Hawk Down, “People will think twice about sending our troops on the ground into a land that we don’t know anything about, to be slaughtered.” Hartnett, however, seems to have been in a different film from the one that Ridley Scott was making. The character of Scott’s film is indicated by the welcome it got from an audience of right wing politicians and military top brass when it premiered in Washington. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz declared Black Hawk Down to be a “powerful film.” His fellow film enthusiasts included Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Army Secretary Tom White, and Iran-Contra plotter Oliver North. Unlike his earlier film G.I.

Jane, Black Hawk Down received the full co-operation of the US military. The actors went through a period of intensive training at Fort Bragg and were, Scott proudly declared, “traumatised” by the time they arrived in Morocco for the start of filming. To get that kind of co-operation Scott had to allow the military a veto over every aspect of the film. As a result, Black Hawk Down is not a genuine artistic exploration of the experience of US intervention in Somalia, but a blatant glorification of US militarism. Scott does not seem to have had to compromise any artistic principles to achieve this result. Interviewed on BBC radio about Black Hawk Down, he repeatedly referred to the US army as a “militia”—as though America’s professional army, maintained with the highest level of military spending in the world, could be compared to the 18th century volunteers who fought for American independence, or the union army that defeated the breakaway by the southern slave-holding states in the 19th century. This was no mere slip of the tongue.

When audience members at a discussion session prior to a special BAFTA screening in London politely questioned the film’s attitude to US militarism, Scott rounded on the chairman BBC film critic, Andrew Collins, in the manner of an interrogator, demanding to know where he stood on American military intervention post-September 11. Scott has made his name with films like Blade Runner, Alien, Thelma and Louise and Gladiator. If they did not tax the audience’s intellect or artistic sensibility, they at least offered a reliable evening’s entertainment due in part to their powerful visual imagery. Black Hawk Down uses many of the same visual techniques perfected in his earlier works, but with the difference that this is a film with a definite non-artistic agenda. Scott is not simply telling a story, he is propagandising for a particular political position. The film was finished before the September 11 attack on the World Trade Tower, but its spirit still reflects the increasingly reactionary outlook of a section of the American elite. It makes for a poor film, which fails even in its own terms as an example of the war or action genre. All Scott’s trademarks are there.

Mogadishu did not provide an opportunity for rain—always a favourite image with Scott—but the aircraft hangar where the troops were billeted offers a suitably post-industrial setting. Helicopters and colourful swirls of smoke were available in plenty. But rather than producing evocative imagery, Scott’s style has been reduced to a series of clichéd visual tricks. At his best Scott narrates a story through visual imagery, using spectacular action scenes to rush the audience over the ever-present holes in the plot. In Black Hawk Down this technique fails. What some critics have praised as a vivid account of “the fog of war” is in fact a confusion of narrative. This is in marked contrast to Mark Bowden’s book Black Hawk Down,* on which the film is supposedly based. Bowden goes to considerable pains to track the events of the 15-hour battle through the streets of Mogadishu and make them clear to the reader. He does this to a great extent by identifying the participants. We learn who they are, why they joined the army and about their families. Scott has carefully avoided this aspect of the book. Character is always pared down to a minimum in his films.

While this may work with two women in a car, with a hundred or so men in a military convoy it presents problems. In Black Hawk Down character is so minimal that even having the soldiers’ names on their helmets does little to distinguish one man from another. Ironically one of the few soldiers to stand out is the character played by Ewan McGregor. Unfortunately it is not through McGregor’s efforts that the character is made recognisable. Even the best actor would have had trouble bringing these characters to life because their dialogue is so limited, rarely extending beyond “f***” and “hu-ah.” “Hu-ah” is a word that appears to mean “yes” and can be delivered in one of two ways—with enthusiasm or without—according to circumstances. Even three years in drama school may not equip an actor to wring much of such limited vocalisation. McGregor’s character stands out because he was originally based on Specialist John Stebbins. When Stebbins was convicted of child molesting, the name had to be changed in an effort to protect the army’s reputation. The new name, “Grimes” was grafted on later and is pronounced at every opportunity for no apparent reason other than to make clear that he is not Stebbins.

Since the characters are ill-defined, it is impossible to engage with any of them. When parts of their anatomy are blasted to a bloody pulp, this has an emotional impact equivalent to the deaths of the virtual figures in a computer game. The result is a profoundly dehumanising and dehumanised film. A number of reviewers have suggested that the film is racist. Certainly the soldiers shown in the film are almost uniformly white. This absence of black faces on the American side is not in itself an indication of racism, however, but is merely an accurate picture of the Delta Force and Rangers. There were only two African-Americans among the Rangers stationed in Mogadishu. In this respect the film merely reflects the racially exclusive nature of the elite units of the US army. What does leave a nasty taste in one’s mouth is Scott’s treatment of the one African-American soldier in the film, Specialist Kurth, played by Gabriel Casseus. This character’s role is merely to grin amiably, like the minor black characters such as servants in old Hollywood films. But the most appalling aspect of Scott’s film is his depiction of the Somalis as an undifferentiated, screaming horde.

Not only does Bowden’s book tell us about the American participants on October 3; he has gone to some lengths to interview Somalis who were there that day. We learn about their backgrounds, what they witnessed and what they did just as we do about the Americans. Scott’s attitude is very different. The role of the Somalis in the film is to die in anonymous waves like the Hollywood Indians of old westerns. The film is shot entirely from the point of view of the American soldiers. We do not learn about the vastly disproportionate number of Somalis killed and injured on October 3. For example, when a helicopter comes down the whole descent and eventual crash is depicted in intricate detail, except for the child who was crushed in the house it destroyed. Since Bowden had already got this material together Scott’s omission is deliberate. Throughout the film no Somali character is shown in a positive light. Only two are differentiated from the mass. One is Osman Atto, a Somali businessman, and Aideed’s financier, whose sole function in the film, is to sit glowering over a glass of tea in an atmospherically lit room. The other is an unnamed gunman played by a large black man in a black bandanna.

Who this character is remains obscure. If he was meant to be Aideed, a short, middle aged man, grey haired and balding, it was a poor representation. No such person features in Bowden’s book. He is Scott’s own invention and he has created a character that has little to do with Mogadishu. It is the stereotype of a violent black gang leader, who could have been slotted into an equally stereotyped vision of an inner city anywhere in the world. The primary value of Scott’s film for the military and political leaders is ideological. Black Hawk Down is an exercise in the manipulation of mass consciousness. Scott is attempting to change the public perception of what happened in Mogadishu on October 3, 1993. At the time it was widely understood as a humiliating defeat for the US military. The few seconds of film CNN screened showing the mutilated body of an American soldier being dragged through the streets shocked the US public, who could not understand why these young Americans had been sent to Mogadishu. CNN had 40 minutes of film from a Somali stringer. It showed only 30 seconds and of that only 2.5 seconds included the dead soldier.

So powerful was this image, however, which was of a very different kind to the slick Hollywood depiction of death and injury shown by Scott, that it made the use of ground troops on this scale politically impossible for almost a decade. It is noticeable that although Scott uses images suggestive of military videos taken from spy planes and helicopters—the entire action that day was filmed, making it what must be the most thoroughly recorded battle in history—he does not show the mutilation of the soldier or attempt to reproduce the imagery of news footage. Instead Scott shows us alternative images of US soldiers who, although wounded, are heroic until the very moment they are killed. He is attempting to create a new memory that will overcome the widespread hostility to American soldiers being killed on imperialist missions abroad. The filmmakers, the right wing politicians and the US military who backed it hope that for those who see Black Hawk Down the sanitised, choreographed violence of Scott’s film will become the image of the October 1993 incident they remember. What then really happened in Mogadishu and what is Scott’s film hiding? To begin at the beginning, why were the American forces in Somalia?

According to Scott’s film they were there as part of the UN mission and their role was to get food aid through to the starving. This was not the case. The famine was already over by the time US troops arrived. Bowden’s book Black Hawk Down and the book Me Against My Brother, by another American journalist, Scott Peterson,** both make this clear. Neither of them is anti-American or left-wing in their political sympathies. Peterson points out that the number of famine deaths had peaked in October to November 1991. President George Bush did not launch Operation Restore Hope until December 1992. In any case the 30,000 combat troops, attack helicopters and warships that Bush despatched were scarcely suitable for an aid mission. A scene at the beginning of the film suggests that the UN prevented US troops from protecting aid convoys. Again this is untrue. The mission was handed over to UN control in May 1993, but effectively the US remained in the driving seat. Although 23 nations participated in the UN operation, political and military control was in American hands throughout. US Admiral Jonathan Howe was in charge of the whole operation. His staff and all the most senior military officials were American.

The US troops sent to Mogadishu were not intended to help the aid effort. Among the Rangers were members of the secret Delta force, a fact that in deference to the military Scott never spells out. The presence of General Garrison in Mogadishu was kept secret because his military background in special operations would have made it all too clear that the purposes of the task force was not humanitarian. Garrison had commanded the Phoenix Program, whose task was to kill Vietnamese village leaders who were thought to be sympathetic to the Viet Cong. Since then he had conducted covert operations all over the world. In the weeks leading up to October 3, the Rangers had earned themselves the enmity of the civilian population of Mogadishu. Three times a day Black Hawks would harass the city’s residents flying along the streets below roof level before soaring back up to hundreds of feet in the air. This activity was popular with the Rangers who told Bowden it was like riding a roller coaster.

Sometimes they would hover low over flimsy shacks blowing them apart, or over a crowded market place tearing people’s clothes from their bodies or even ripping babies out of their mothers’ arms, in a practice the pilots called “rotor washing.” Even before October 3 the US military were casually brutal about the number of dead and injured among the Somalis, whom they referred to contemptuously as “Sammys” or “Skinnies.” They regularly lobbed mortar shells into the city from the UN compound. They hit hospitals and homes killing an unknown number of civilians. No attempt was even made to count the number of casualties when troops opened fire on crowds. The single action that did more than any other to cement Somali hostility and to unite the different clan factions in Mogadishu against the Americans was the massacre of a meeting of Habr Gedir clan elders on July 12, 1993. They had convened their meeting to discuss peace proposals Admiral Howe had put to them the previous day. Cobra gunships armed with TOW missiles and 20 mm cannons attacked the house, with ground troops finishing off the wounded.

When the mission on October 3 went wrong the US troops found themselves in a situation that was largely of their own making. Bowden is very candid about the extent of civilian casualties on October 3. He describes how the American troops opened fire on civilians as they put it “mowing down whole crowds of Sammies,” laughing when they blew a woman apart. He also admits that they took women and children hostage. Scott’s film does not show the hostages and pays no attention to civilian casualties. Nor does Scott admit, as Bowden does, that the Rangers went to pieces under fire and that their discipline broke down. The average age of the Rangers was 19, with many almost fresh off the high school football pitch having never been under fire before. Bowden notes that one of soldiers joined the army because his wife was pregnant and he needed a better-paid job with a health plan. Scott never demonstrates this amount of interest in his characters. He is concerned only to manufacture a glorious event out of a military debacle. He does not want his audience to dwell on the tragedy of these wasted lives. He certainly does not want us to ask who was responsible for getting these young men killed and maimed. Why did these young men die?

To answer that Scott would have had to examine the background to the US intervention in Somalia. This is the most glaring omission in the film. There is no hint of America’s long-term involvement in the area and its role in creating the tragic situation in Somalia through its support for the vicious dictator Siad Barre. The US had supported Siad Barre since the mid-1970s. Until then Somalia had been a Soviet ally. When neighbouring Ethiopia overthrew Emperor Hailie Selassie, the Soviet Union shifted its support to the new Ethiopian regime. The US government took the opportunity to form an alliance with Somalia, pouring millions of pounds worth of sophisticated weaponry into this backward country, because it offered a base on the strategically important sea lanes leading into the Middle East. Siad Barre exacerbated clan rivalries and was responsible for causing famine by devastating the farming districts. During the late 1970s and 1980s Somalia became the largest recipient of aid in Africa, but most of this money went on military spending. By the late 1980s Somalia was awash with arms.

When rebellion broke out in the late 1980s, the US backed Siad Barre as he ruthlessly suppressed opposition. In 1988 he razed the city of Hargiesa to the ground in an attempt to destroy the rival Isaaq clan. In these years every young Somali learned to use an assault rifle. In 1991 Siad Barre was overthrown. A unit of US Marines had to be diverted from the Gulf to evacuate the US embassy, which was by then the largest in sub-Saharan Africa. The American landing a year later was an attempt to recover this strategic base on the Horn of Africa and to consolidate the Middle Eastern gains that the US had made in the Gulf War. This bloody intervention proved unsuccessful at the time, but the present US administration has shown that it is eager to complete Bush senior’s unfinished business in the Middle East. Somalia is on the list of targets in the “war against terror”. While it may be lower down the list than Iraq, a repeat visit can be expected. For all its superficiality, Scott’s film takes on a sombre meaning in this context. Film is the most deceptive of media, because it conveys the illusion of reality so strongly.

It shows us what we think we can see or, ideally, what a good director thinks and sees in his mind’s eye. If he does his job well that is how we think we see the world thereafter. Scott has been employed like a political hack to make a world audience think differently and lay the ghosts, Somali and American, of October 3, 1993. * Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down, Bantam Press, 1999 ** Scott Peterson, Me Against My Brother, Routledge, 2001 Black Hawk Down accused of airbrushing history | Film | The Guardian Black Hawk Down accused of airbrushing history Friday 21 December 2001 05.39 EST Close This article is 15 years old Black Hawk Down, the fact-based war movie from director Ridley Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, stands accused of changing the names to protect the guilty. The film tells of heroic American soldiers in 1990s Somalia. But it was revealed this week that the inspiration behind one of the leading characters is currently serving a 30-year sentence for child abuse.

In Black Hawk Down, Ewan McGregor plays the character of Ranger John Grimes as a clean-cut everyman hero. That trouble is that Grimes is merely Ranger John "Stebby" Stebbins in disguise. In June 2000 Stebbins was court-marshalled and later found guilty of assault and rape of a girl under the age of 12. Mark Bowden, who wrote the Black Hawk Down book and screenplay, this week told the New York Post that he was pressurised by the Pentagon to change Stebbins's name in order to avoid controversy. Bowden refused to do so in the book, but eventually capitulated when writing the screenplay. Stebbins's ex-wife, for one, is angered by the changes.

In a letter to the New York Post, Nora Stebbins wrote that: "[producers] are going to make millions off this film, in which my ex-husband is portrayed as an all-American hero, when the truth is he is not." Starring McGregor, Josh Hartnett and Tom Sizemore, Black Hawk Down revisits the fraught events of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, in which a crack team of American soldiers were stranded behind enemy lines after their helicopter support went down. "I think it's a very important story that we've told," McGregor insisted earlier this week. The actor has been a fan of the story since he first read Bowden's book. "[I] just couldn't stop turning the pages," he remembered. "I had to keep reminding myself that there were real characters and it really happened." Black Hawk Down opens in the UK on January 18. Black Hawk Down on PS4, PS3, PS Vita | Official PlayStation®Store US Please enter your date of birth to continue.

Description From acclaimed director Ridley Scott (GLADIATOR, HANNIBAL) and renowned producer Jerry Bruckheimer (PEARL HARBOR, ARMAGEDDON) comes a gripping true story about bravery, camaraderie and the complex reality of war. BLACK HAWK DOWN stars an exceptional cast including Josh Hartnett (PEARL HARBOR), Ewan McGregor (MOULIN ROUGE!), Tom Sizemore (SAVING PRIVATE RYAN), Eric Bana (CHOPPER), William Fichtner (THE PERFECT STORM), Ewen Bremner (SNATCH) and Sam Shepard (ALL THE PRETTY HORSES). In 1993, an elite group of American Rangers and Delta Force soldiers are sent to Somalia on a critical mission to capture a violent warlord whose corrupt regime has lead to the starvation of hundreds of thousands of Somalis. When the mission goes terribly wrong, the men find themselves outnumbered and literally fighting for their lives. © Copyright 2001 Revolution Studios Distribution Company, LLC and Jerry Bruckheimer, Inc. All Rights Reserved. See More

Question: The 2001 film 'Blackhawk Down' told the story of a US
Answer: SOMALIA